Jack Salzman, Cornel West Struggles in the Promised

Allies of a Different Sort \\ 217
The fight between Black and Puerto Rican community activists and the predominantly
Jewish UFT irrevocably damaged the liberal Black-Jewish alliance.
Old Left Jewish radicals who had cultivated links with working-class Black and
Latino communities were suddenly forced to choose between supporting a labor
conflict and an important community issue affecting aggrieved populations of
color. Both sides fought for things progressive activists supported. But both sides
fought tenaciously, consequently eliminating the possibility of reconciliation any
time soon.
Whither the Alliance?
After the Ocean Hill-Brownsville conflict, the polarizations of the next quarter
century had been firmly established. In a perverse twist of history and fate, the
most influential Jewish Marxist of the mainstream, former Trotskyist leader Max
Shachtman, used the Socialist Party/Social Democratic Federation (SP/SDF) as a
launching pad for a major generational and political maneuver. Speech-writer for
George Meany's attacks on the anti-war movement, Max Shachtman provided ideological
(and often tactical) guidance to UFT leader Albert Shanker during the
Jewish confrontations with African American activists.
Shachtman's ceaseless maneuvering pointed the way for a minor SP/SDF
leader, Abraham Foxman, to move into the increasingly conservative leadership
of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). Still others from Shachtman's SP/SDF
would become lead staffers in Jeane Kirkpatrick's United Nations office, in the
neo-conservative Freedom House, and in their favorite agency, the National
Endowment for Democracy. Linking their support of Israel to their broad cooperation
with the Central Intelligence Agency during the "dirty wars" against insurgents
in Central America (and for the Contra war against Nicaragua) and in the
Front Line states in Southern Africa, they inevitably widened the breech between
sections of Jewish officialdom and the Left, including the Congressional Black
Caucus and Jewish progressives. By the early 1990s, this had reached the nearfratricidal
level of ADL infiltration and disinformation against heavily Jewish
environmental and Central America support groups. 52
Three-quarters of a century earlier, in 1899, the Jewish Daily Forward, organ
of expression for a bureaucratic Jewish socialism, had blessed the U.S. invasion of
Cuba and the Philippines as bringing civilization to the savages. 53 In the new
reading of American empire and world events, only the military strength and
resolve of the world's greatest capitalist power could protect the Jewish State and,
indeed, all civilization from the threatened depredations of fanatical Arabs. 54
Thus several aging Social Democrats and a handful of extremely well-placed proteges
leaned heavily on the neoconservative side of international affairs, while the
ADL was the most unsparing of Jesse Jackson's attackers within the Jewish community.
At the end of the Cold War, manque socialist rage sputtered mainly now
toward questions of race and culture, in the pages of Commentary and the heavily